Product review is the most popular type of social proof and also the most potent type in the realm of e-commerce, as 92% of consumers now read at least one online company review before making a purchasing decision.
How can product reviews benefit your brand? And how do you add reviews to Shopify stores to build trust and boost sales? Let’s find answers to your questions and concerns about customer reviews in this article!
Why do your Shopify stores need reviews?
Increase trust and loyalty
Genuine product reviews act as social proof, assuring potential customers that your products are trustworthy and worth their investment. When seeing positive experiences others share, 93.7% of digital shoppers trust a brand more.
This increased trust fosters long-term loyalty, as satisfied customers are more likely to return for future purchases.
Increase conversion rate
Product reviews have a direct impact on your conversion rates. A well-detailed review can give potential buyers the information they need to make an informed choice. This eliminates doubts and uncertainties that often hinder purchase decisions, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.
It’s also proved that when reviews were displayed for a lower-priced product, the conversion rate increased by 190%, and for a higher-priced product, the conversion rate increased by 380%.
Provide customers with product insights
The top 3 reasons why customers write reviews are to help others make a better buying decision, to share an experience, and to reward a company for good performance. Thus, product reviews offer new customers an inside look into your products from previous users’ perspectives.
They provide insights into real-world usage scenarios, highlighting both the strengths and potential shortcomings of your products. This information empowers shoppers to match their needs with your product's capabilities.
Improve customer service and product quality
Constructive feedback through product reviews is a goldmine of opportunities to refine your customer service and product quality. By carefully analyzing reviews, you gain invaluable insights into areas that require enhancement or adjustments. Responding to reviews, addressing concerns, and implementing necessary improvements showcase your commitment to customer satisfaction, further solidifying their loyalty.
Add reviews to Shopify stores in 3 simple steps
Unlike vintage themes with old structure, Shopify’s Online Store 2.0 themes like Minimog or Zest, with sections on every page and app support, enables you to add product reviews and review form effortlessly without using code. You can follow this step-by-step guideline to add reviews to your Shopify store.
1. Choose a product review app
As Shopify doesn’t have a built-in feature for customer reviews, you must use a product review app to add customer reviews and review forms to your stores. This product review app can be the native app of Shopify - Product Reviews app or other Shopify reviews app provided by Shopify partners.
To choose a product review app, you need to consider these factors:
- Price: Different apps offer various pricing tiers, often correlated with the features they provide. Determine your budget and the scale of your business to find an app that aligns with your financial resources. While cost is a consideration, it also factors in the value the app brings to your store in terms of increased sales and customer engagement.
- Features: Different businesses require different features. Evaluate whether the app aligns with your goals, such as collecting and displaying reviews, photo and video integration, and options for collecting reviews on multiple platforms. If you're running a niche store, ensure the app supports industry-specific features that cater to your target audience.
- Support and updates: Consider the level of customer support provided by the app's developers. Timely assistance can be crucial when you encounter any issues or need guidance during setup. Additionally, check if the app receives regular updates to ensure compatibility with the latest Shopify updates.
You can refer to this review to know which product review app suits your business. After choosing the most suitable Shopify reviews app for your store, you can install it and create a review section on your store.
2. Add review and review form on Shopify
Now that you have a powerful product review app, how to add a review section on Shopify stores?
To start, you should go to your online store and click “Customize” your theme. In the theme editor, you can add reviews and the review form as a section or a block; it depends on your theme.
Depending on the apps you use, you can add a review section in many different places. While some apps just allow you to create a review section/block on the product page and product section only, some apps allow you to add this section everywhere in the customers’ journey, from the homepage to the cart page. Thus, you should check the availability of this feature before creating your review section.
After knowing where you can add a review section, you can follow these steps to add review section:
- In the theme editor, navigate to the product template where you want to add the review and review form section
- Click Add section / Add block
- From the section menu, in the Apps section, choose Review section from your product review app to add
- Click Save
With this method, you can add other review sections like Star rating, Review widgets, or reviews badge as long as your product review app provides these sections.
3. Set up a review section to build trust and engage customers
After you create a review section, you need to set it up to make sure that it works seamlessly with your store and needs.
Although each review app has different features, normally, they all share some same setting options which you need to customize:
Auto Publish
You can choose to auto-publish new reviews or manually curate and publish them. For small businesses with a small number of reviews, it’s recommended that you turn off this setting and curate reviews by yourself, as you can easily remove spam and reviews with wrong information. Thus, your potential customers won’t distrust your brand when seeing these reviews.
For growing businesses with many reviews to curate, you can use an app with advanced auto-publish settings. For example, Judge.me app allows you to auto-publish reviews based on stars, auto-filter profanity, and censor personal information.
Review listing layout
In this setting, you will need to customize the color, padding, and the number of reviews displayed on a page. These options can make the review section align with your brand identity and fit the best with the position where it's displayed, increasing brand awareness and streamlining customers' browsing process.
Review listing text
In these settings, you can customize all the text for the area where reviews are displayed on your website. It can be text for review headlines, summaries, pagination, and so on.
Customizing this option can help you optimize the review section’s UX, making it easy to understand and compelling to customers who engage with your review section.
Review Form Text
This setting is used for customizing the text, and which fields are required and displayed for the new review form. By adding some compelling text to the CTA buttons like “Share your thoughts”, “Tell us about your experience”, and “How did you like your purchase?”, you can attract and convince more customers to leave you a review.
When customizing required fields, try not to ask for too much personal information about customers, like address, phone number, or age, which may scare and frustrate your customers.
How to import reviews to Shopify review section
A review section is a must-have, but an empty one doesn't work at all. Consumers need to see a certain number of reviews before they trust your brand. Over 25% of customers only trust a rating if it has between 11 and 50 reviews, and 19% of shoppers expect between 51 and 100 reviews.
Thus, you’d better import reviews from other platforms and review services into your Shopify stores.
How to add reviews on Shopify by using CSV files
Normally, all product review apps allow you to import reviews from other platforms and review services using a CSV file.
This is the guideline on how to add reviews to your Shopify store with a CSV file:
- Prepare your CSV files: Most review services let you export your data to a CSV file, so you can easily download a CSV file of your review data from the review service that you want to migrate from. However, each product review app requires a CSV file with a different format and information fields. So, after downloading your CSV, remember to check these requirements of your review app and make suitable adjustments to your file.
- Import reviews: From your Shopify admin, click Settings > Apps and sales channels. Open your product review app here. Whatever app you use, you can find the import review option on the first page of this app. Click Import > Choose file > Upload CSV file.
- Curate imported reviews: After successfully uploading CSV files, all imported reviews will be displayed on the review manager panel. You can filter the spam, outdated, irrelevant, and negative reviews here and choose
How to add reviews to Shopify from AliExpress
How can you fulfill the review section if you’re running a dropshipping store, but your products haven’t had a review yet? It’s when you should import reviews from AliExpress by Shopify reviews apps.
As Shopify doesn’t have a native app for this task, you should consider using other product review apps on Shopify App Store. The top 3 review apps in the Shopify community are Judge.me, Loox, and Ali Review.
As all the top-notch review apps mentioned above have an AliExpress import feature, let’s find out how to add reviews to your Shopify stores with these apps.
How to import reviews from AliExpress with Judge.me
To import reviews from AliExpress with Judge.me app, you should follow these steps:
- Install Judge.me AliExpress Reviews
- Click Import Reviews from AliExpress
- Fill in the URL of AliExpress product and Import to your Shopify product
- Optional: Choose the number of reviews you want to import, country & content filters to match your market and your need
- Choose the language to translate reviews to
- Click Import Review
Source: Judge.me
It’s effortless to import reviews, but how to take advantage of this feature is another story. It would help if you focused on the optional options of country and content filters.
You should filter country to import reviews and choose the equivalent language to translate them to make your reviews the most relevant to your target market and audience.
For the content filter, you should import both reviews with content and reviews with photos to make your review section more trustworthy, as 62% of consumers are more likely to purchase if they see photos and videos of other customers. In addition, reviews with content should contain at least 10 characters as the short review often looks unreal and spammy.
How to import reviews from AliExpress with Loox
You can easily add reviews to Shopify from Aliexpress with Loox in some simple steps:
- Drag the "Import to Loox" button to your bookmarks bar.
- Go to the AliExpress product page you want to import the reviews from.
- Click the “Import to Loox” button on the bookmarks bar.
- Choose which product on your store you want to import AliExpress reviews to.
- Choose the number of reviews you want to import.
- Filter reviews based on stars and country to import.
- Choose the language to translate your reviews.
- Tick additional import condition: Fetch most recent reviews, Only reviews with photos, Import variant information (item types).
- Click Preview & Import.
Source: Loox
The process of importing reviews with Loox is also like a breeze, but you also need to pay attention to some conditions to utilize product reviews for your store.
Firstly, also like Judge.me, you should choose the country and language to translate based on your target market.
Secondly, filter the reviews with 4 stars and above; don’t just import 5-star reviews.
Customers are more likely to purchase products with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5 than 5-star ratings due to today’s skeptical consumers’ “ too good to be true” sensibilities.
Besides, you should fetch recent reviews only if possible because customers often consider recency when reading reviews. 34% of shoppers just look for product reviews between a week and a month old, while 25% only look for reviews between one and three months old. You should also import reviews with content and photos like with the Judge.me app.
Lastly, unless your products have the same variants as this on Ali Express, please don't import variant information since the wrong variant information in the reviews may make it seem fake.
How to add reviews to Shopify from Aliexpress with Ali Reviews
- Add Ali Reviews extension to Chrome
- Choose products that you need to add reviews on your store in Ali Reviews dashboard by clicking Import Reviews
- Fill in AliExpress link of the product that you want to crawl reviews.
- Customize settings for imported reviews:
- Import reviews in date range: Import reviews in the chosen period only
- Review quantity: Choose the number of reviews per import. This number can vary based on your pricing plan
- Publish imported reviews: Auto-publish reviews or not
- Customer name: Censor customer name with *** or not
- Content option: Choose to import reviews with content or without content or both
- Photo option: Choose to import reviews with images or without images or both
- Skip reviews with keywords: Choose not to import reviews including undesired keywords
- Translate reviews: Choose to translate reviews or not and choose the language to translate reviews
- Review location: Choose the country of reviewers to import
- Click Import Reviews
Source: One Commerce
Like the aforementioned review apps, there are some noteworthy options when customizing review import settings to make the most of product reviews. You should choose the location based on your market and import recent reviews, reviews with content, and photos only.
Besides, only censor some reviewers' name, as a review section full of * look spammy and untrustworthy. It would be best if you also skipped reviews with negative keywords like "broken", "slow shipping", "fraud", "scam", "isn't received", etc
Conclusion
Product reviews with great benefits are essential for Shopify stores. To add a review section to your Shopify store in the most effortless and effective way with a Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme and a product review app.
This article will equip you with detailed guidelines, tips, and tricks to create and customize a review section, as well as import reviews from AliExpress to build trust and boost sales for your Shopify store.
However, to make the best use of customer reviews, you need a helpful assistant like our Minimog - the Shopify Online Store 2.0 theme with stunning design, conversion-focusing features, endless possibility of customization, and powerful integration with top-notch product review apps like Judge.me, Loox, etc.
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